Bullshit

During an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, former FBI Director James Comey’s wife, Patrice, confessed that she supported Hillary Clinton and was “devastated” when Donald Trump won.

“I wanted a woman president really badly, and I supported Hillary Clinton,” Patrice Failor Comey told Stephanopoulos. “A lot of my friends worked for her. And I was devastated when she lost.”

James Comey admitted that his wife and girls all took part in the Women’s March in response to Donald Trump’s election.

“My wife and girls marched in the Women’s March, the day after President Trump’s inauguration,” he said. “At least my four daughters — probably all five of my kids, wanted Hillary Clinton to be the first woman president. I know my amazing spouse did.”

The GOP’s business-first leadership has expanded the H-2B visa-worker program, so reducing marketplace pressure on companies to offer higher wages to Americans just months before the November election.

The pre-election giveaway is buried on page 1760 of the 2232-page 2018 omnibus bill, where language allows the Department of Homeland Security to greatly expand the size of the H-2B visa-worker program up to roughly 100,000 imported workers:

SEC. 205. Notwithstanding the [66,000] numerical limitation set forth in section 214(g)(1)(B) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1184(g)(1)(B)), the Secretary of Homeland Security, after consultation with the Secretary of Labor, and upon the determination that the needs of American businesses cannot be satisfied in fiscal year 2018 with United States workers who are willing, qualified, and able to perform temporary nonagricultural labor, may increase the total number of aliens who may receive a visa under section 101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(b) of such Act (8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(15)(H)(ii)(b)) in such fiscal year above such limitation by not more than the highest number of H–2B nonimmigrants who participated in the H–2B returning worker program in any fiscal year in which returning workers were exempt from such numerical limitation.

The jargon gives the green light to Senators and Representatives to pressure DHS leaders until unless they agree to hand out more H-2B visas to the politicians’ local employers.

Many thanks, @timkaine & @MarkWarner for signing the letter to our Senate leaders urging them to include language in the FY18 omnibus package requiring caps to be increased for temporary worker visas. #SaveH2B. Time is running out for many small businesses.

“This shows that Congress uses the budget process to grant special access to insider lobbyists,” said lawyer John Miano, who opposes visa-worker programs. “By granting the ability to slip special interest provisions into a bill that must pass Congress, it rewards those who supply donations,” he added.

(Mitch Says) “get your hand out of my ass” Paul

The H-2B visa-workers are imported by landscapers, forestry companies, seafood processors, construction firms, resorts, hotels and restaurants to import foreign workers for seasonal work. The imported workers are not cheap — see the data here — but their arrival means that employers do not have to raise their wages to persuade Americans to take seasonal jobs.

Moreover, if they raised their wages high enough to attract Americans to the seasonal jobs, then the companies would also have to raise wages for their year-round and supervisory workers.

Those extra wages would reduce company profits, raise costs and reduce the number of customers, and shrink the number of companies. But the extra wages would also leave hundreds of thousands of American voters working in higher-wage jobs, and would also nudge many additional employers to raise wages.

That free-market outcome is anathema to many GOP leaders, including House Majority Leader Paul Ryan. He has repeatedly said that immigration rules should be tuned to help employers — not employees — and that CEOs should be allowed to hire “any willing worker,” even if those workers live far outside the United States.

In 2015, Ryan sharply increased the size of the H-2B program, but after Donald Trump’s shocking victory in 2016, he let the program return to the 66,000 level.

In 2017, Ryan against pushed to expand the program with a 2018-style rule that encouraged legislators to pressure DHS officials for additional visas. Under then-DHS chief John Kelly, the agency reluctantly granted some additional visas, but far fewer than sought by business groups.

In 2018, the Department of Homeland Security has started distributing the 66,000 regular H-2B visas via a lottery because so many companies asked for a share of the H-2B visas.

The H-2B program is dwarfed by the size of the white-collar guest worker programs, via the H-1B, L-1, J-1, H-4, TN, and OPT programs. Collectively, these white-collar outsourcing visas keep more than 1 million foreign university graduates in healthcare, computer, business, and design jobs sought by American graduates.

The existence of the H-2B visa program creates a “crony-capitalist” economy. Companies which win the government-provided workers get to reduce their payroll costs, win more customers and generate more profits. Companies which do not get H-2B workers shrink and lose business. This dynamic forces many companies and labor-brokers to compete for the H-2Bs and to lobby for even more H-2Bs, so generating business donations and endorsements for politicians — at the cost of cutting wages for many Americans.

The program also distorts local economies. For example, in forest towns, the program allows out-of-state forestry contractors to ignore local job-applicants in favor of foreign H-2B workers.

Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney joined SiriusXM host Rebecca Mansour on a special Friday night edition of Breitbart News Tonight to discuss a recent court ruling that the military must accept transgender recruits and what President Trump’s administration should do about it.

“The issue that really is at the heart of this matter as far as I’m concerned is, does the president have the unquestioned authority under the Constitution of the United States Article II, which vests exclusively in him, the role of Commander-in-Chief of the United States’ armed forces, or does that authority now get subjected to the whim of any federal judge in the United States judiciary?”

Gaffney said the issue is of immediate significance for the administration as it does not appear that the Department of Justice is going to ask the Supreme Court to stay the judge’s order to compel the Department of Defense to begin enlisting more transgender individuals at the beginning of the new year.

This is what the military has become. Yes he was a man and still is damit!

Gaffney said he believes that makes this “nothing short of a constitutional crisis” and opens the door for a federal judge to intercede in military decisions going forward, perhaps even to the extent of countermanding a presidential order to go to war.

“That could be fatal to our republic,” said Gaffney, adding, “I think the predicate, the precedent for it is being set as we speak.”

Gaffney urged the administration “to fight this effort by the judiciary to essentially intrude upon and eviscerate his authority as commander-in-chief.”

He said the first order of business for the White House should be to order the Justice Department to seek an emergency stay by the Supreme Court, allowing for the decision to be properly adjudicated.

Added Gaffney, “I would hope that the president would try to establish through another order to the Defense Department – and by the way the Homeland Security Department because it’s responsible for the Coast Guard – that anybody who is brought in under these existing court rulings if they are not stayed – is done on a conditional basis. It seems to me that’s the bare minimum that can be done here.”

Gaffney indicated that then, if the Supreme Court does overturn current rulings, transgender individuals admitted into the military under the rulings would not be allowed to remain in the armed services.

“I believe that’s a safety valve on this and it seems to me to be a sensible one,” Gaffney said.

Bannon asked Ryun about celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred’s involvement in the Roy Moore case, representing a woman who accuses Moore of assaulting her in 1977 when she was 16 years old.

Ryan said Allred is “basically a human vulture when you look back at some of the things she’s been involved in.”

“Remember the incident with Arnold Schwarzenegger?” Ryun asked. “She brought all these women in front of him, said they’re going to sue, they’re going to file suit against Schwarzenegger. Guess what? After the election, absolutely nothing happened.”

“I think a real turning point was that press conference when they pulled out the yearbook and the signature,” he said of Allred’s entry into the Moore controversy, referring to an interview with MSNBC’s Katy Tur where Allred did not come off well.

Ryun said this interview demonstrated that the best way to respond to sensational allegations is to “just throw facts back at them.”

“I’m remembering clearly, you remember this, the incident where I just brought up the Clinton Foundation, Uranium One. This is back in the spring. Couldn’t believe the reaction,” he said.

“Back to Alabama, we were talking in the break about this poll. This is John Kerry’s pollster who did this poll that just came out recently,” Ryun said, referring to a Fox News poll that showed Democrat Doug Jones with an eight-point lead over Republican Roy Moore.

“Because John Kerry’s pollster has an agreement with the other company, Schoen Company, which is Karl Rove’s,” Kassam replied.

Ryun cited an observation the late Christopher Hitchens made in 1992, that “polls these days are not made to truly understand public opinion, but they’re meant to shape public opinion; they’re used as a weapon now.”

(As Kassam pointed out, Hitchens’ poetic way of phrasing this was to say that “opinion polling was born out of a struggle not to discover the public mind, but to master it,” and, in particular, to develop a weapon against organized-labor populism.)

“Pull all the Band-Aids off in D.C., and I think that at the end of the day, you’re going to see some things that will undermine the corrupt consultant class as the Band-Aids get ripped off on this,” Ryun predicted. “I think people need to start asking about behavior at the party committees. It’s time that we actually say, ‘Let’s have an honest conversation, a wide variety of thoughts.’”

Bannon interpreted this to mean that Ryun was accusing the D.C. “consultant class” of concealing a good deal of inappropriate behavior toward women.

“That’s what I am implying,” Ryun replied. “I think this might, ultimately, even though there are going to be some interesting moments moving forward, I think this will be a good thing for the populist movement.”

Ryun said there was no doubt in his mind that the allegations against Moore were part of an “organized hit,” as Bannon put it.

“I’ve been in D.C. almost 20 years. And, again, I don’t have hard proof, and I will say this clearly: I do not have hard proof, but I strongly suspect it’s a very short list of people, all who are associated with Mitch McConnell – whether it’s Josh Holmes, whether it’s Karl Rove, might even be Steven Law – I don’t know, but I strongly, strongly suspect somebody out of the McConnell camp planted the story.”

“It was planted. This came with the blessing of Mitch McConnell at some point, that he was going to take a political shot at Roy Moore,” he declared.

Bannon asked for Ryun’s thoughts on Restoration Weekend and his role as a presenter at the event.

“It’s so important. You bring together just some great people – obviously yourself, Raheem; you’re going to have Congressman Devin Nunes as the keynote speaker. You’ll be speaking, I know, later today,” Ryun replied. “It’s just great where people come from all over the country, spend three days together, be able to interact with people like you and like Devin Nunes.”

“I’m really excited to introduce Congressman Nunes,” he added. “He has been the rock star on unmasking Fusion. So I’m excited to be here. He’s a rising star. Keep an eye on him. You know, the thing is, he took it on the chin this spring. They were going after him, undermining his credibility. He didn’t stop.”

In a controversial move, California Gov. Jerry Brown has signed a bill lowering the crime of deliberately exposing a sexual partner to HIV from a felony to a misdemeanor.

The measure comes just as an HIV-positive man in Scotland is being prosecuted for purposefully infecting a number of his Grindr dates with the virus, by insisting on “unprotected sex” or using perforated condoms.

“Maybe you have the fever. I came inside you and I have HIV LOL. Oops!” Rowe texted to one partner, while he reportedly said to another in a phone call, “I ripped the condom. You’re so stupid. You didn’t even know.”

Rowe is now facing charges of “infecting four men with the virus and attempting to infect a further six,” a crime considered “Grievous Bodily Harm” in the United Kingdom, carrying a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The new California regulation lessening the crime of deliberately exposing others to the HIV virus was authored by state Democrats Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Asm. Todd Gloria (D-San Diego), and cosponsored by a number of LGBT groups.

Republican lawmakers such as Sen. Jeff Stone, who is also a pharmacist, and Sen. Joel Anderson of Alpine voted against the bill, arguing it puts the public at risk.

“I’m of the mind that if you purposefully inflict another with a disease that alters their lifestyle the rest of their life, puts them on a regimen of medications to maintain any kind of normalcy, it should be a felony,” Anderson said during the floor debate.

“It’s absolutely crazy to me that we should go light on this,” Anderson said.

In 2015, an HIV-positive California landscape architect who boasted of intentionally infecting others with the virus was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading no contest to a misdemeanor health code violation.

Evidence from 11,000 text messages and three dozen audio clips showed Thomas Miguel Guerra bragging of his exploits and joking about keeping his condition secret from his sex partners.

“Yay lol,” read one text. “Someone getting poz that day. Poor Sucka.”

The San Diego judge who sentenced Guerra couldn’t hide her anger over the case.

“I think that’s a tremendous oversight in the law if this is just a misdemeanor,” said Judge Katherine Lewis, calling the light sentence a “travesty” while insisting the offense should be changed to a felony.

“He hits drifters,” testified one of David Dean Smith’s alleged female victims. “He hits people who are young. He hits young women, and from what I understand, he hits men, too. Those are his targets.”

A detective investigating the case said that Smith “intentionally attempted to spread the disease to kill people. His latest fantasy is strangling a woman and having sex with her dead body.”

The ACLU, which cosponsored SB 239, described the new measure as “modernizing” California HIV laws while praising Governor Jerry Brown for reforming “outdated laws that unfairly criminalized and stigmatized people living with HIV.”

In their report, the ACLU said that the law criminalizing the exposure of others to the HIV virus was passed in the 1980s and was “based on fear and the limited medical understanding of the time.”

LGBT activists also praised the new law, alleging that the former legislation unfairly disfavored specific groups.

“California’s outdated and draconian HIV criminal laws have disproportionately harmed people of color and transgender women,” said Melissa Goodman, LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Project Director with the ACLU of Southern California.

“With the enactment of this law, our laws will now become more fair, less discriminatory, and will promote treatment and prevention rather than criminalization,” she said.

Rick Zbur, the executive director of Equality California, an LGBTQ advocacy group, said that SB 239 “is not only fair, but it’s good public health,” and will be “good for all Californians.”

“With his signature, Governor Brown has moved California’s archaic HIV laws out of the 1980s and into the 21st century,” Zbur said.

The new law makes the intentional transmission of the HIV virus a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than 6 months, if the perpetrator acts with the specific intent to transmit the disease to another person.

It also makes it a misdemeanor “to attempt to intentionally transmit an infectious and communicable disease,” punishable by imprisonment in a county jail for not more than 90 days.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — The NAACP urged religious conferences, athletic events and musicians on Friday to avoid North Carolina as part of a national boycott protesting the state’s conservative policies including a law limiting LGBT protections.

It was the first step in a national boycott that could expand to include other economic and tourism measures, according to a resolution approved by the group’s national board. The organization stopped short of telling its members to cease all travel and spending in the state — which has been a component of previous boycotts elsewhere.

“Right now in the state of North Carolina we have children — Dear God, children! — who are being imperiled, who face the prospect of being bullied as a consequence of politicians using them as political pawns while we talk about bathrooms,” said the NAACP’s national president Cornell Brooks.

His comments come two days after Republican President Donald Trump’s administration rescinded federal guidance that public schools nationwide should allow transgender students to use restrooms that match their gender identity.

The Rev. William Barber, who leads the state’s NAACP chapter, proposed the boycott late last year after a deal fell apart to repeal the North Carolina law known best for requiring transgender people to use restrooms in many public buildings corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate. The law, often referred to as House Bill 2, also excludes gender identity and sexual orientation from statewide antidiscrimination protections.

But Barber stressed the boycott would also pressure the Republican-controlled legislature over efforts to limit the new Democratic governor’s power as well as ongoing legal battles over voting rights and how electoral districts are drawn.

“What has happened in North Carolina makes this state a battleground … for the soul of America,” said Barber, who has drawn thousands to rallies protesting conservative policies in recent years.

The NAACP was part of a coalition that successfully sued to overturn much of a 2013 North Carolina elections law requiring photo ID from voters who cast ballots in person. A federal appeals court said it disproportionately targeted black voters. Republicans have appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republican Senate leader Phil Berger called on Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to “condemn William Barber’s attempt to inflict economic harm on our citizens, and work toward a reasonable compromise that keeps men out of women’s bathrooms.”

Asked about the boycott, Cooper’s spokesman Ford Porter said in an email: “While Governor Cooper continues to urge business to come to North Carolina in spite of HB2, Republican legislative leaders need to stop holding our economy hostage to this disastrous law.”

The NAACP’s boycott resolution says the group won’t hold future national meetings in North Carolina and urged other groups to take their business elsewhere, too. The resolution says the organization could take other steps, such as urging the divestiture of North Carolina-related investments.

Brooks declined to offer further specifics or a timetable for deciding on whether to escalate the effort, but suggested the group’s previous boycotts could serve as a model.

The NAACP boycotted South Carolina for 15 years over flying the Confederate battle flag on Statehouse grounds. When that boycott was approved, the group urged all of its members nationwide to avoid visiting or spending money in the state. The flag was removed in 2015.

Already, House Bill 2 has caused numerous conventions, concerts and sporting events to pull out of North Carolina, depriving it of hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact. The state also lost several large-scale business projects with hundreds of jobs because of the law.

The NAACP’s announcement comes as Charlotte hosts scores of students and alumni from historically black colleges and universities as part of the men’s and women’s CIAA basketball tournaments. The conference has moved other athletic events from the state, but said late last year that time constraints and contractual obligations made it too difficult to move the basketball games. The CIAA’s basketball tournaments brought an estimated $56 million to the city in 2015, according to local tourism officials.